Abstract
This paper explores a divisive hierarchical clustering algorithm based on the well-known Obligatory Contour Principle in phonology. The purpose is twofold: to see if such an algorithm could be used for unsupervised classification of phonemes or graphemes in corpora, and to investigate whether this purported universal constraint really holds for several classes of phonological distinctive features. The algorithm achieves very high accuracies in an unsupervised setting of inferring a consonant-vowel distinction, and also has a strong tendency to detect coronal phonemes in an unsupervised fashion. Remaining classes, however, do not correspond as neatly to phonological distinctive feature splits. While the results offer only mixed support for a universal Obligatory Contour Principle, the algorithm can be very useful for many NLP tasks due to the high accuracy in revealing consonant/vowel/coronal distinctions.
Highlights
It has long been noted in phonology that there seems to be a universal cross-linguistic tendency to avoid redundancy or repetition of similar speech features within a word or morpheme, especially if the phonemes are adjacent to one another
PIE seems to obey a cross-linguistic constraint that disfavors two similar consonants in a root. Another specific example comes from Japanese, where the phenomenon called Lyman’s law—which effectively says that a morpheme may consist of maximally one voiced obstruent—can be interpreted as avoidance (Itoand Mester, 1986). In light of such evidence, proposals have been put forth to define the concept of phoneme by distributional properties alone as opposed to the prevalent distinctive feature systems which are largely based on articulatory features (FischerJørgensen, 1952)
Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2017), pages 290–300, Vancouver, Canada, August 3 - August 4, 2017. c 2017 Association for Computational Linguistics that this phenomenon of “Similar Place Avoidance” is a statistical universal. This phenomenon is often filed under the generic heading “obligatory contour principle” (Leben, 1973; McCarthy, 1986; Yip, 1988; Odden, 1988; Meyers, 1997; Pierrehumbert, 1993; Rose, 2000; Frisch, 2004)
Summary
It has long been noted in phonology that there seems to be a universal cross-linguistic tendency to avoid redundancy or repetition of similar speech features within a word or morpheme, especially if the phonemes are adjacent to one another. PIE seems to obey a cross-linguistic constraint that disfavors two similar consonants in a root Another specific example comes from Japanese, where the phenomenon called Lyman’s law—which effectively says that a morpheme may consist of maximally one voiced obstruent—can be interpreted as avoidance (Itoand Mester, 1986). After finding a statistical tendency to avoid similar place of articulation in word-initial and word-medial consonants, Pozdniakov and Segerer (2007) offer the argument This phenomenon is often filed under the generic heading “obligatory contour principle” (Leben, 1973; McCarthy, 1986; Yip, 1988; Odden, 1988; Meyers, 1997; Pierrehumbert, 1993; Rose, 2000; Frisch, 2004). Accounts range from information compression to a diachronically visible hypercorrection by listeners who misperceive the signal and make the assumption that repetition is unlikely (Ohala, 1981)
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